February 6, 2009

This may run a little long since I have intimate experience with Bill Gates' program for small schools within schools.

In 200X or so, my daughter was attending XYZ High School in the VAPAC program (Visual and Performing Arts Center), a magnet school for the city that rivaled the best FAME programs in the country in terms of great teachers and motivated students.

VAPAC was a school within a school at XYZ High. It had about 500 kids among a greater student body of 2000. The program's classes were open to all the students for plays, choir, band, etc.

XYZ High was broken up at 25% white, 25% black (ghetto) 25% asian (Hmong, Vietnamese) and 25% Hispanic. The VAPAC program had a majority of whites who helped raise the test scores for the entire school.

Then The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation raised their head. XYZ High was offered millions to transform into small learning communities where it would be broken up into groups of 500 kids or so who would matriculate together as helping and bonded communities since large schools were impersonal and made kids feel lost and adrift.

When this proposal was made to the parents of Vapac students, we protested. They were going to dissolve the small community that already was working and effective.

What came about was a lesson in racial politics. VAPAC had to be destroyed because it was too white (60% or so). The black (female) Principal and others complained that not enough black students were in the plays, musicals, choir, jazz dance, etc.

It was explained that everyone in the school was eligible to participate and win roles based on ability, but that wasn't good enough. So they set out to ruin the program.

The school district then transferred the school to the retired Phoenix Suns basketball player Kevin Johnson (now mayor), who promised to make his charter school a beacon of great test scores to send ghetto blacks to college. It hasn't happened of course. Vapac was destroyed (one of the best high school programs in the country and world), and XYZ High is now a school everyone but a few blacks avoid.

My daughter was able to graduate in the last year of VAPAC, fortunately for her.

Of course, my wife and I tried to tell others at the various "community" meetings that Gates' ideas were crackpot social engineering that wouldn't work either since improvement always depends more on discipline and parents' involvement than schemes and grant money.

13 comments:

wongba
said...

sorry to burst ur bubble, but studies show u're wrong about parental involvement. it doesn't really matter much how good/bad u are as a parent (unless u're a fritzl). ur own intelligence and ur kids' friends are what most affect their academic outcomes.

wongba, if you pay attention to the reader's language, he said "improvement always depends more on discipline and parents' involvement than schemes and grant money."

And that's true. The role of hereditary intelligence (and other hereditary factors) is undeniable. But it's incorrect to think that no intervention can result in any improvement ever; given how much damage educracy has done by now, there are a whole host of possible interventions almost guaranteed to result in across the board improvements -- only, they're not the sort the educracy is prepared to consider.

All that said, you try bringing up "race and IQ" at a meeting!

A way most certainly needs to be found to publicly broach this most perplexing of subjects (at least until you get your head around and realize it's not so scary), but hammering people with data and syllogisms won't have the desired effect at this point.

As a prostitute who has often been called upon to service Bill Gates i can tell you that his IQ is the ONLY thing about him that is impressive!!!And he is a SICKO!!! (Note:satire)(A real prostitute wouldnt read this blog,and if she did,the odds of her having been employed by Mr. Gates---assuming that Gates has ever been to a prostitute in his entire life, (and if he has how do we know it was even here in America?It may have been in a foreign country where the prostitutes dont even speak English and probably wouldnt even know who Bill Gates is!!)--well sir,those odds would be astronomical,indeed!! )

Too bad Steve didn't talk about Melinda's remarks at the kickoff of the Gates Millenium Scholars program. http://www.gmsp.org/default.aspx She shot off her mouth about those who had faced "racism" and "sexism" in their lives.

Get real.

Melinda was raised in an upper middle class neighborhood here in Dallas. The neighborhood is still almost all white, though now full of retirees and a handful of young married couples. Melinda's high school was Ursuline Academy. It's located in an affluent North Dallas that is close to George Bush's new Preston Hollow home. Melinda's high school classmates were white, except for a handful of blacks. I know this as I used to socialize with women who were in Melinda's graduating class.

For Melinda or Bill to speak of "racism" or "sexism" is farcical. Neither one has ever had to deal with separate-but-unequal standards for jobs or university admissions, much less deal with incompetent, stupid minority bosses.

Several years ago Microsoft was getting sued for discrimination (by blacks of course). At the time I wished there was a way for both to lose. Now I wish Gates had lost - and maybe had his eyes opened a little (though that would've been unlikely).

I'm trying to figure out exactly what it is that ruined my school. I had a student shamelessly inform me today that our unit on marijuana was wrong because it listed "hallucinations" among the possible side effects. He'd used plenty of times and he'd never had any. He's probably 14 or 15, but really, he's neither. He's got the maturity of an 11-year-old, but his parents probably monitor about as well as normal people would monitor a 20-year-old.

The problem is a bunch of hippy leftists decided there was something wrong with shame and judgement and accountability. But mainly with judgement. Now when we tell them "use your judgement", kids think we mean "do wuddeverthehell you want".

People developed existentialism, nihilism, postmodernism, and the like as a hobby. Sort of the educational-philosophical equivalent of building bombs in your back yard.

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